Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Cor blimey, Guv, where to?”

He does not want to return to the office, does not want to go home. “Take me,” he says, inspired, “to a swell hotel.”

A doorman opens the cab for him and he steps out, pays the driver, goes through the revolving doors and checks in. He remembers he has no pajamas and asks the room clerk if there’s a men’s store in the hotel.

He tells the salesman he takes a D.

“Any particular style, sir?”

“Crisp. Linen. Crisp.”

He pays for the pajamas and returns to the desk to pick up his key.

“Luggage, sir?”

He holds up the new pajamas. The clerk hesitates. “What do you want? You want me to pay in advance? What’s the damage?” He looks down at the card he has just signed. “Twenty-eight bucks? Here.” He pushes the bills toward the man who at first does not pick them up. “What is it, you think I’m a troublemaker, a suicide? Furthest thing from my mind. Gimme my key. Gimme my key or I’ll get the manager.” The clerk extends the key and a bellboy steps forward. The Phoenician puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a dollar and gives it to the bellboy. “Save you a trip,” he says and, holding his new pajamas, moves off in the direction of the elevators.

He loves a hotel room. This one is large, new. He is on the twenty-third floor. Through the wide clean Thermopane he can see the ball park, the clipped chemical grass, bright, glowing as emerald, green as eyeshade, has a perfect view into the stadium’s open skull, the variously colored stands folded like nervous system along its sides. Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva. It is a corner room and commands the south and west; he can see Kentucky. He does not draw the drapes, bunched tight, coiled on a recessed track that runs along the ceiling above the windows, pleats on pleats in a loose reserve, a collapsed bellows of fabric. The blue drapes match the blue bedspread which looks as if it has never been used — looks new, as everything in this room does: the deep modern chairs, webbed as baseball gloves and with seats like the pockets in catchers’ mitts, the two-foot-high cherrywood strips set into two beige walls textured as taut canvas, the aluminum grill of the heating and air-conditioning unit flush with the top of the long window seat by the enormous western wall of glass. He admires the desk (of the same smooth cherrywood) that levitates against a wall, its drawers suspended, hanging in air like holsters. He sits in the red low-backed chair and moves his lap into position beneath the desk, opening a drawer, seeing with satisfaction the stack of thick white stationery, the golden logotype of the letterhead, the two ballpoint pens, the yellow Western Union blanks. He clears the menu, textured and greasy as a playing card, from the surface of the desk, removes the tented cards that announce check-out time and give instructions about the operation of the TV, and places them in a drawer beside the treated shoe-polishing cloth and folded paper laundry bag with its tough kite string and green laundry ticket, a framed gum reinforcement hole at the top. He trails his fingers in the pile of brochures, shuffling them like a magician preparing a card trick. He closes the drawers which move back silently along their grooves. On the right the smooth wooden desk — the wood in this room does not feel like wood, it is level as glass — becomes a chest of drawers, then a treaded slab on which to place suitcases. There are five lamps in the room: on the desk, on the chest, beside his bed, on a low white table; a chrome floorlamp with a tall narrow shade. The television swivels on a chrome stem before the southern window. He turns it on, and from his bed the figures on the screen seem to stand in the sky. He reaches over to the control panel — there is an electric clock, a radio, a speaker like a patch of brown canvas, rows of switches, buttons — and clicks it off. He walks into the bathroom, sees plastic jewel cases of soap, towels of different size and thickness like a complicated terry-cloth cutlery or a pantry of flag. He runs his hand along the rail angled like the trajectory of a banister above the tub, and touches the beautiful basin with its queer fittings. Like a dignitary cutting a ribbon, he tears the paper strip that packages the toilet seat. He pees long and hard into the bowl, drilling his urine solidly into the faintly blue water.

He loves a hotel room.

I love a hotel room. This is in my blood. Oasis in my Phoenician genes, way station in my ancient heart.

He returns to the bed and picks up the phone by the night-stand, first pulling out the tray at the base of the phone to study the information on the card there. He dials.

“Room service? Mr. Main in two-three-four-one. How late do you serve?…Excellent…No, nothing now, thank you. I may get hungry around three this morning.”

He dials a different number. “Is this the housekeeper?…Housekeeper, if I should want some laundry done, could you…What?…Oh, I want the valet, do I?”

“Valet? Have you same-day service?…What about dry cleaning?…Thank you very much, valet.”

“Message desk? Are there any messages for Mr. Main in two-three-four-one?…Yes, dear, would you please?…The red light? Where might that be?…Yes, I see it…No, it isn’t flashing. I thought it might be broken. Could you test it, please?…Yes, there it goes now. What’s the message?”

And the bar and the garage and the Avis desk. He makes inquiries about a baby sitter and calls the cashier and asks about cashing a check. He finds out, too, that he can leave his watch and valuables in the hotel safe.

Then he dials nine-nine. “Who,” he asks, “is the house doctor?…I see. Can you tell me anything about him?…Well, like where did he intern?…Could you find this information out and call me back? Or leave a message with the message desk? Or give me his room number and I’ll do it myself…Isn’t that nice, we’re on the same floor.”

He calls the doctor. The man has interned with the Sheraton chain.

And one last call. “Operator, this is Alexander Main in two-three-four-one. I want to leave a call for seven A.M.…Thank you. Goodnight to you, too, sweetheart.” It is not yet four in the afternoon.

He did not ring up for theater tickets or dial the florist. He didn’t call the hairdresser or ring 32 to request a Remington shaver or 64 to find out about an interpreter. He didn’t put a call through to rail and air reservations or to the hall porter to inquire about kenneling his pet. He never rang the secretarial service. But he was reassured that these services and others were available, that he sat in his room linked, hooked up as a President to his needs, oddly loved, certainly trusted, his cash and checkbook and cards like letters of credit to the world. He could have anything he wanted — carpenters to build him boxes, models from stores to show him new fashions, women, passport photographers, even locksmiths. He was totally self-contained, desert-islanded but not deserted, certainly not lonely, his options open, more dilated here than at home or at work or in the street. How silly of the hotel to call him its guest. His credit established he was something far more privileged and potent.

In this mood he showered, not bothering to close the stall, careless of the water he deflected against the mirrors and walls, of the puddles he made on the tiled floor. Private, possessed by his privacy. In this mood rubs himself dry with the enormous bath towel and leaves it crumpled in a heap beneath the sink, takes one by one the pins from his new pajamas, their odor of freshness like the smell of health, their new resins like a pollen of haberdash. He draws the drapes, touching them, feeling their heavy, opaque lining, pulling them so tight that it might be a half-hour beyond dusk instead of barely four o’clock. He goes to the door to leave his shoes in the corridor for the porter to polish, already anticipating the morning when he will hook them in like a croupier. He removes the bedspread, tosses it in a corner, feels the cool bleached sheets, white as letterhead, the soft blanket. He sleeps. I sleep. He dreams. I dream.